Benediction Denied: A Labyrinth of Souls Novel

by Engstrom, Elizabeth

  He wasn’t that desperate. Not yet. He kept going, kept the glow of the blue light in his sight, and headed for it as quickly as he could.

  But the tunnel-digging light was far faster than he, and soon he lost sight of it. Soon after, the glow of it winked out and he was alone again in the darkness. He slowed, walked carefully, hands windmilling in front of him and to the sides, so as not to run into anything.

  The tunnel turned again left. It seemed as though he had merely done a u-turn and should soon be back to the cavern and the lake. Instead, he ran right into the end.

  Dead end.

  He ran his hands around both sides of the tunnel and the end. The sides of the tunnel were rounded, the floor and the end were flat. Smooth as glass. Seamless.

  He shouted up at the ceiling in case the tunnel had inexplicably turned up, toward the surface, but the sound that bounced back clearly told him that he was at the dead end. Somehow, he had missed a turn.

  How could he possibly have missed a turn?

  Or, this was where the magic had just petered out. Like the little blue flame, it didn’t last forever.

  He backtracked, but the tunnel was too wide to touch both sides with his fingertips, so he kept up the windmilling rhythm. He began to sing, listening for a change in the sound of his breath as it echoed off the smooth black walls.

  “Hey there, ho there, is anybody there …”

  There it was. A change in the echo of his voice, a turn to the right.

  But the tunnel also kept going straight.

  Now he had to make a decision.

  If he turned to the right, was that the way he had come in? He didn’t want to backtrack all the way back to the cavern, nor did he want to waste time and energy going down dead ends.

  He stood for a moment, listening.

  Silence. Deafening silence. Silence so complete he thought he heard things out of the corner of his ear, the way he continually saw flickers of movement out of the corner of his eye in the pitch blackness.

  Silence so complete he thought he could hear his own insanity taking root and beginning to grow in the fertile soil of his paranoia.

  The choice of one tunnel seemed to be the same as another.

  He would go straight.

  He began again working his exhausted arms, hoping that he wasn’t going to fall into a pit while he was trying not to miss the next turn, or run nose-first into another dead end.

  “Hey there, ho there …”

  The echoes were very clear to his heightened sense of hearing. He knew when he was closer to the right side than the left side.

  “Is anybody there …”

  Okay, so from the cavern, he had turned left and left, but that was a dead end, so to get back to where he was, the way was really only one left and then a right. He didn’t think he was either gaining or losing in elevation, so it was unlikely he was spiraling, he was just going straight ahead.

  He detected another tunnel off to the right. A tributary?

  Go right? Or straight ahead?

  If he went right, he might merge with the tunnel that would take him back to the cavern. If he kept going, he might actually get some place.

  Straight it is.

  Sweating, muscles aching, socks worn through, feet blistering, Adam had to stop and rest.

  The tunnel no longer smelled like a fresh rain squall, now it was back to smelling like burned dirt.

  How could he have missed the way out to those fresh breezes?

  God DAMN.

  He sat down, back against the tunnel wall and worked with the shard of glass to open the hard coating of a giant squash seed from his pocket. It filled his hands, the size of a hamburger.

  If he were normal-sized and on the surface of the earth, he would have traveled at least ten miles through these tunnels. Or so it seemed. But being a tenth of his usual size, it could be that he had only traveled a mile.

  Should he continue?

  How could he not continue?

  And yet, his feet weren’t going to be able to make it much farther. He could rewrap his feet in the sleeves from his shirt, but that wouldn’t last long, either. Even though the tunnel floor was new and smooth, his feet were tender and unaccustomed to being without shoe leather.

  What if he threw a card and wished himself normal size?

  Well, he would never fit in this tunnel in that case. Would the tunnel grow with him?

  Unlikely. Besides, he was not very good at getting what he wished for when he threw a card.

  Still, he had options. He could continue to follow the tunnels, which now seemed more like an incomprehensible maze, or he could spend another card and see if it got him anywhere.

  He finished eating the soft inner seed, wiped his sticky hands on his pants that were still damp from his slide down the river, unbuttoned his shirt pocket and took out the cards.

  The last time he chose one in the dark, it had felt different. It was as if it had chosen him, instead of the other way around.

  He weighed each card, but they all seemed to be the same. Nothing different. Maybe this was not the time nor the place to employ the magic. Maybe he was still supposed to follow the tunnel and just go where it led.

  He closed his eyes and rested his legs, his feet, his hands, his brain.

  “Is your heavenly god a trickster like our underground gods?” Jolmy’s big face loomed in front of Adam.

  He startled awake.

  Jolmy wasn’t there, of course, he was home with his family, while Adam was still stuck in the blackness of the tunnel. He had dreamed Jolmy. Jolmy and his trickster god.

  Trickster! This was a trick. This had to be a trick of Jolmy’s gods. But what was a trick? The tunnel? Or the cards? Was it all a trick and he would wake up in Jolmy’s house, safe, happy, ready to get to work on finishing the water system?

  No, somehow he had been tricked into this wretched place and was completely without resources to get himself out.

  Well, he wasn’t completely without resources. He was smart. He had a couple of gigantic seeds in his pockets. He had a bit of broken glass. And he had the cards, though they were dwindling. But for all the magic they had provided him, had he gotten any closer to home?

  He didn’t think so.

  He was not a fan of Jolmy’s gods. But then his traditional gods weren’t helping much, either, were they?

  He was no kind of pastor, not at all educated in the Bible or any other Christian works. He took his family to church now and then, but other than hearing the importance of being a good man and a good father, he didn’t really pick up on much more.

  Really? A good man? A good father?

  When they asked him to teach Sunday school in the village, he was happy to do it. Missionaries had been here before, and many of the local residents knew more about the Bible than he did, but the little lessons appealed to everyone.

  They loved the things like the Golden Rule. They delighted in happy things that weren’t even in the Bible, like the Footprints in the Sand poem. The children all loved that, and he made up little quizzes for them, simple moral dilemmas that they would have to think about, ways to make it real to them. Being nice was always a good thing. Was a holy thing.

  And here he was, in a definitely unholy situation.

  One option he didn’t have was to give up. He would not die in this tunnel. Not as long as he had stumps to walk on and a giant seed in his pocket. He would keep walking. He would navigate this maze in the darkness until he got home to his wife and daughters.

  “Lisa,” he whispered. “I’m coming home to you. Chrissie. Sonja. Mouse.”

  He stood on aching, trembling legs, got his balance on his raw feet and tried to remember if he had come from the left or the right.

  No trickster god was going to keep him from his family.

  In a burst of frustration, he pulled out a card and threw it at the wall. No wishes, no prayers. The gods knew what he needed, and maybe the magic did, too.

  The concussion knocked h
im back against the wall, and he was horrified, in the flash of light, to see that there were many tunnels. Hundreds of tunnels, all leading off the tunnel he was standing in. Another identical tunnel every couple of feet. He was no longer in the main tunnel, whatever he thought that meant.

  There were infinite choices, infinite possibilities for error, or death.

  Were there also infinite possibilities for success?

  When the flash ended, Adam saw that the little blue flame was back, burning brightly on the ground next to his foot.

  He picked it up and a hot ball of emotion rose up his chest and lodged in his throat. He was so happy to have not only light, but the one thing that seemed to help him, the blue magical little companion that gave him hope.

  “Welcome back,” he said to it, and wiped his eyes. “Let’s get out of here.”

  6

  LISA FREQUENTLY REMINDED Adam of Occam’s Razor. All things being equal, the simplest answer is likely the right answer. His eldest daughter was the scholar, writer, poet, and scientist in the family. Not especially interested in his field of fluid mechanics or hydrology beyond a basic knowledge, but she did believe in Occam’s Razor from the very first time she heard it. She cited it frequently, at the breakfast table, in the car, on vacations, and whenever anybody else in the family was in the midst of a puzzling situation.

  So if Occam’s Razor was true, then Adam was dreaming. He was at home in bed in Minneapolis, dreaming of going to Congo with the Justice Corps and helping a village set up a water system. Or, he was already in Congo, mid-project, sleeping on a mat on Jolmy’s floor.

  Or maybe he was still a teenager, living in his parents’ house, dreaming of his future.

  Or maybe he was an old man, reflecting on what had been, what might have been.

  Lisa, and maybe Occam, would say that he was caught up in a loopy nightmare.

  And if that were true, then he could just sit down and bide his time until morning.

  He reached up and probed the wound on his scalp where it had split open from the force of a baton in the hand of a revolutionary asshole.

  Still tender. Wound closed into a long scab, lump still there, but much smaller. The scab was real. Definitely real. More real than any dream.

  Even if it was a dream, it was not in his nature to just sit and wait to wake up.

  He had to move.

  He stood in the main tunnel, with myriad adjunct tunnels extending from it, like the teeth of a comb. “Which way?” he said out loud, as if the blue flame would answer him.

  He held the light up high, looking for anomalies, anything that would sway his decision. But the tributary tunnels all seemed identical. All carved precisely—by the blue sizzling magic, he presumed—out of black rock. Every surface was the same, smooth and perfect as if melted from rock into glass. No ridges, no rivets, no edges, no flaws.

  He could keep going forward in what he thought was the main tunnel, or he had an apparent infinite choice of side roads.

  He kept going forward, along the main tunnel, the way he thought he was going before stopping to rest. He passed five, six, seven tunnel entrances, and then at the eighth, he paused.

  Something was different here.

  He listened.

  Nothing.

  He sniffed the air, but that wasn’t it, either. He wet a finger and held it up, but there was no breeze, fresh or otherwise.

  He sang into it. “Hey there, ho there.”

  His voice echoed as he expected it would. Close walls and ceiling, endlessly extending forward.

  And yet, something was different. There was an alteration to the air, to the density of it. The other tunnels seemed dead, as if they were dead ends, or continued to wind around forever, but this one had something at the end of it.

  Life.

  He detected life.

  With a deep breath, he headed into the tunnel, and to his amazement, it angled upward.

  “Yes!” he said to the flame. “This is what we want. Closer to the surface. Ever closer to the sun, to the light, to grass and trees.”

  He continued to sing the song he had taught Lisa to sing whenever they were hiking in the woods. Minnesota bears didn’t like being surprised by a silently marching family through their territory. So they sang, they sang loudly and in unison. “Hey there, ho there, hello you, bear there.”

  Good lord, he hoped the magic wasn’t going to bring him a bear.

  Despite being in fair to middling good shape, climbing a steep incline while singing took a toll, and Adam found that he needed to rest more and more frequently. Something at the end of this tunnel was calling him, but in that dreamish way, he couldn’t quite get to it. The tunnel seemed to lengthen, as if he was walking in water, or sand. His salty, perspiration-soaked clothes again chafed his crotch, his neck, under his arms.

  His blistered feet were numb. For that, he was grateful. The time would come when they would shriek at him.

  This was all so very dreamlike.

  He remembered childhood nightmares where he’d been kidnapped or tied up and thrown into the trunk of a car, but his mouth had somehow been befuddled and he could not scream. Or the dream when he was running from bad guys, but no matter how fast he ran, he made no headway and they gained on him, relentlessly getting closer.

  Horrible nightmares. Invariably, he woke up panting, sweating, heart pounding. It took a long time—sometimes hours—for his body to calm down, for him to consider going back to sleep.

  And now, here he was, stuck in a real nightmare.

  Then, ahead, he saw a brightening. A faint light—like daylight—glistened off the side of the tunnel.

  He set the blue flame on his shoulder again so he didn’t have to carry it. He leaned forward and worked his screaming thigh and calf muscles up what now seemed to be a very steep ramp.

  Daylight! Was it daylight? Could it be he was finally close to getting the hell out of here?

  As he climbed, he tried to figure out where he was with respect to the makeshift prison cell, or with respect to the village.

  There was no way he could know. If he came up in the middle of the jungle, hundreds of miles away from the village, that would be just fine with him. He would find a way home.

  He would need to be normal size, of course, otherwise any one of a dozen jungle predators would make quick work of him.

  But his size was a product of the underworld. Surely he would be a normal size when he got out of here.

  And yet, he became this size while in the prison cell.

  Adam shook these thoughts out of his head. It was better to think about being above ground, escaping this particular hell and getting home to the village.

  If he came up in an area he didn’t know, he could dodge into the jungle, or behind shrubbery or trees if he saw the rebel jeeps coming toward him. He could hitchhike if he saw a farmer or a friendly face approach. It would be easy to get home, back to the village, he was sure of it, if only he was given the opportunity. If only he was above ground. If only he was back to his normal size.

  He began to imagine the sun. The green plants. The soft earth. The raucous African wildlife. The unmistakable smell of the jungle, green and sweet, fetid and cloying, all at the same time. He imagined soaking his tortured feet in a cool stream. Hugging Jolmy and his wife and children. Being tended to by the village doctor. Telling the tale of his kidnapping. Regaling the village elders around the evening fire with his experiences of the trickster gods below.

  He couldn’t wait.

  He very slowly made his way up the hill, leaning far forward, one laboriously slow step at a time, heart pounding, breath coming hard, his headache back, starting to hammer.

  The light brightened as he neared. The tunnel turned to the left, and with each rasping breath raking his throat, his lungs aching with the effort, thighs and calves cramping, Adam reached the turn.

  He stopped, hands on thighs, gasping for air. When he caught his breath, he stood up and made the turn.

 
; He stood, stunned, in full light.

  Ahead of him spread an incredible vista. It looked exactly like the countryside of Ireland. Rolling green hills, pastures separated by low rock walls. Little stone houses dotted the landscape, one-lane country roads wound between houses, streams gurgled through the pastures where sheep grazed. Each house had a picturesque little garden.

  Ireland! What? Ireland?

  But there was no blue sky. No clouds. Some indistinct light source illuminated the scene.

  Not Ireland. He was clearly not yet above ground.

  Another trick.

  This had to be a mirage. This was evidence of his madness. He had been suspecting it for some miles now.

  He wanted nothing more than to run down through the fields, to roll in the grass, to pull fresh clothes off the clotheslines and breathe deeply of their fresh scent. He ached to have a cup of tea in one of the kitchens with whatever portly, aproned woman cared to brew him one. He would eat her warm, freshly-baked scone, slathered with sweet butter and homemade jam. He was eager to pull up a fresh carrot or pluck a ripe, red, sweet tomato and smash it into his mouth.

  But between him and the little path that led down into this dreamscape stood a sturdy gate with shining brass bars, exactly like the one that had separated him from that mongoose.

  That was so, so long ago.

  Softly, in the distance, a church bell tolled.

  Adam gripped the bars on the gate and tried to rattle it.

  Firm. Solid.

  So near and yet so far.

  His knees weakened in despair and he sank to the ground, hands gripping the bars like those on a jail cell, eyes feasting on that which he could not have, longing for that which he had taken for granted his entire life.

  He closed his eyes and “Please, God!” escaped from his lips. He took a breath and opened his eyes.

  It was still there. Tantalizing.

  Tormenting.

  Not real.

  He looked at the archaic locking mechanism of the gate. There was no knob, no lever, no keyhole. He had no idea how to open it.

  He gripped the bars with both hands.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey! Help me!”

  His voice bounced back to him muffled. His plea didn’t project down to the houses, to the little village beyond. He sounded as if he was shouting into a pillowcase.